Not really true.
It's true in Germany, not in many other places. Germany is one of the few
countries in the world who still have a rather strong monopoly on phones,
although it finally seems to be crumbling there too, as even the Germans
are growing tired of bad service and exorbitant fees ;)
And even in Germany, it's only true of drivers that do everything in
software: most modern ISDN cards have the actual connection smarts in
firmware and do not need the same certification (well, they do, but not on
the OS driver side: now it's a hardware certification issue). So only a
rather small subset of the ISDN code is actually affected by these rules,
and its' fairly easy to say something like "for these cards, it is illegal
to connect the machine to the phone line if this part of the code has been
changed".
I think it's basically just one or two drivers, and a subset of the driver
at that.
And quite frankly, let the people vote with their feet. Civil disobedience
is not always a bad thing, as shown by people like Gandhi. Bringing down
bad phone monopolies may not ever count as highly as getting the British
Empire out of India, but let people decide on their own whether they
should just bend over and take bad rules.
SuSE may as a company decide that it cannot legally ship untested drivers,
for example. They probably don't want to open themselves up to being sued
by Deutche Telekom or whatever it is called. But even Germans are
individuals - all the folklore to the contrary notwithstanding, and should
be allowed to make their own informed judgement.
Linus
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